There have been several points in my life where I’ve met people and immediately known the moment I set eyes on them that we are going to have a major impact on each other’s lives. It’s a bit like the concept of a Karass or Granfalloon in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle – but I couldn’t say decisively which one. It has always been unequivocally mutual: me and these people might not end up wanting the exact same things at every stage of our often brief associations but we absolutely experience the same sense of gravity. It generally manifests as attraction of some nature but at its core it feels like some personification of The Universe or Fate has placed tiny statues of us on the same chessboard for some hidden purpose.
The later iterations of this phenomenon manifested in the company of specific and detailed instincts. A silent voice from somewhere deep inside me offered a general warning against allowing things to move in a romantic or sexual direction. It never really made too much of a difference as I’m not really the type to exercise caution in matters of the heart but at least I had some kind of warning that I shouldn’t expect any happy endings. This first time I was running blind and for better or worse I ended up with the only boyfriend of my life.
Jordan was soft spoken and had dark eyebrows with matching close cropped hair. There was a single mole on his face and his brown eyes looked sensitive and innocent. He was a basic type of small town indie rock boy I see all the time but I’m not sure if I did a good enough job of describing it. Think plaid flannel shirts and long silences that are made to appear thoughtful but actually represent not knowing what to say. A faint smile the moment that the warming effects of alcohol begin to take hold and smooth away some of the anxieties that keep him interacting with the world as a spectator.
I met Jordan at a house full of good looking normie skater stoner boys that went to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He had been working as a baker and wasn’t quite the same type as all of the other guys he’d been living with. He was a couple years younger than me but I didn’t think about that as much as I probably should have. I was young myself, only just twenty one for less than even a month. I looked across the room and our eyes met and then it was already too late to change anything.
I talked to him about my theory of “urban shamanism” – the idea that overdosing on cough medicine created the same kind of synergy with a modern city environment that ethnobotanical drugs presented to the mountains and forests of Stone Age level traditional cultures. He must have liked the way I made it sound because I ended up shoplifting a couple of boxes of Coricidin for us from the closest Walgreen’s. It would be my final baile with the blister packs – the mere sight of the tiny red pills would come to induce uncontrollable waves of nausea after this encounter had devolved into the resulting wreckage.
A DXM trip presents in stages. The first part is giddy with the general visual and auditory trappings of the more traditional psychedelics. We wandered into the simply named Occult Bookstore in Wicker Park and I scoured the shelves for a particular grimoire so obscure it probably didn’t even exist. At the Fireside Bowl I convinced Brian Peterson to let us spend a few minutes roaming around a concert I can’t even remember the genre of let alone who was playing.
We ended up back in Jordan’s basement room which was full of quilts and nice wooden furniture – it looked like the way I imagined the inside of Big Pink from the famous Bob Dylan record. The DXM trip was shifting into what I always referred to as the “featherweight ballerina” phase. Normally it made me feel light on my feet and somewhat otherworldly like I was living in an antique photograph. This particular time there were some unprecedented side effects.
The best way I know how to explain it is that the barriers that generally separate one human consciousness from another were suddenly and unceremoniously ripped away. Jordan and I seemed to be psychically connected and concepts like secrets, disagreements or even personal property had simply dissolved in the light of our intense and urgent newfound connection. As we stared into each other’s eyes I screamed out in frustration at a world of stories that had unforgivably neglected to explore the depths and contours of this new and unprecedented experience:
“I hate every movie ever made!”
When we were finally able to fall asleep we shared his bed but had to separate our gangly frames – any physical contact felt like an electrical shock. This might sound like the kind of thing we would want to explore or experiment with but we actually recoiled from it. We held hands when walking after that but such was the full extent of our carnal relationship. We never once kissed or otherwise pursued the sexual or even romantic side of things. Writing this now I realize it sounds like we were actually friends but we weren’t. We were together, we were a couple. I mean we were kids with no idea what was happening but I’ve been married for ten years now and for the short time that Jordan and I were entangled it fundamentally felt the same.
I didn’t have a cell phone back then, I had never been in the habit of listening to the radio and I didn’t turn on televisions. The next morning was September 11th, Jordan had left at the crack of dawn to make bread so I went over to Dave, Meg and Vanessa’s Ukrainian Village apartment to get a couple more hours of sleep before I had to be at my Italian Cafe job. I woke up and the place was empty so I decided to walk over to the house full of hardcore boys that had played against El Rancho in the Softball Game. I think they called it The Midtown Chess Club.
As I made my way up a side street the neighborhood was particularly animated. Everybody was sitting out on their stoops and balconies and calling back and forth about “when the plane hit the building” and if everybody saw it or not. I figured that one of the Die Hard movies or something similar was playing on a local network television station and people were just excited to get a break from the soaps and talk shows.
I walked into the house and a TV was just on and tuned into the news. Everywhere I went for the next couple of days a TV would be playing like that – just going over the same things over and over until the News Anchors started to look sleep deprived but they just kept going. I saw the smoking tower and that it was news and it was real and America was under attack. Aaron Hahn and Sean Rafferty and whoever else came back into the room and silently stood there and watched it with me.
Somebody was supposed to be going to College but they found out it was closed. There was this irrational fear that any public gathering of two or more people would be targeted in another attack. People thought this in every small town across America that day and we were in Chicago – one of the biggest cities. I figured that I wasn’t going to be going to work.
Jordan and I had talked about the fact that I had been intravenously using heroin and cocaine and had decided that I should stop for a while. I hadn’t been doing it every day or anything like that but it did seem like a good time for a break. Then September 11th happened and I wanted to do something – anything – that felt familiar and normal and that was getting high. I took West Chicago Avenue under the Metra tracks and when I passed the Aldi by Kedzie I was in the zone. The whole city had shut down but the corners were business as usual.
I figured that Jordan was back from work early and I went over to his house. I told him that I’d gotten high but it wasn’t a big deal or anything. The TV was on and his roommates were smoking weed and making really stupid jokes about how the smoking ruins of the buildings were actually giant smoke sessions. Jordan and I decided that we should get out of town for a few days and made plans to take a train to Holland, Michigan and visit his parents for a little while.
There was a noise show I wanted to see at The Fireside that night. Thirteen noise artists were touring together in an RV and trying to play back to back 5 minute sets in the shortest possible amount of time. It was called Phi Phenomena on Wheels. It was actually a great lineup – there were really cool sets from Ortho and oVo and Temple of Bon Matin. Jordan didn’t like the energy and went home early. I forget who was up first but I remember the first thing that was said into the microphone:
“This is the “Attack on America” Tour!”
In the constantly escalating transgressive world of Experimental Noise Music there’s no such thing as “too soon”.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 